The new Doug Liman movie Fair Game was the only American film in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year, though less for its art than its stars (Naomi Watts and Sean Penn) and political message.
Based on memoirs by former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson (Penn) and Valerie Plame Wilson (Watts), a CIA agent outed by White House officials, the movie tells how a couple of patriotic civil servants were betrayed by the Bush administration and pilloried by its media flunkies. Fair Game is no better than fairly good. It starts with thriller clichés and ends in sanctimonious preaching, but in between there are a couple of true things: a portrait of a marriage under stress, and a depiction of the arrogance of power that leaves a sharp after-burn.
Liman (The Bourne Identity) begins his film in familiar thriller mode, with a swooping camera, in Kuala Lumpur where a stylish Canadian business woman (Plame, working undercover) is thwarting the advances of a sleazy businessman. When Plame returns home to her Washington suburb, the set-up suggests one of those domestic spy comedies, like True Lies or Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Valerie and Joseph arrange play dates for the twins, communicate with each other through Post-it notes and phone messages, and go out for drinks with friends, when Joe typically gets on his soap box.
Meanwhile, on TV, the President and his gang are selling the case for the imminent invasion of Iraq, and the CIA is pressed to find any evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The agency approaches Joe, an African expert, to go to Niger and find out if the country has sold yellowcake uranium ore to Iraq.
Later, he accuses the White House of misrepresenting his findings in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Eight days later, he gets the return blow: Washington Post columnist Robert Novak, acting on information from White House officials, outs his wife as a CIA agent. A subplot about an Iraqi scientist and his American sister serves to stand in for Plame’s sources who have been exposed and betrayed.
Much of the first half of the movie takes place in Langley or White House offices, as government representatives push the CIA to spin its information. It features a nicely snaky performance by David Andrews as Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief-of-staff who later took the fall for the misdeed (President George W. Bush commuted his sentence). The film’s title comes from another of the anti-Plame conspirators, Karl Rove, who allegedly told MSNBC’s Chris Mathews that “Wilson’s wife is fair game.”
The second, more compelling part of the movie shows the Wilson marriage under duress. Penn and Watts (who have worked together twice before, in 21 Grams and The Assassination of Richard Nixon), easily establish the occasionally fractious intimacy of a real marriage and are convincing in showing how their bond is frayed by the assault of reporters, death threats and slurs from the right-wing media.
Joe, the emotional fighter, wants to go to war on the cable television and lecture circuit. Much of the self-righteous bluster feels like Sean Penn playing Sean Penn. The more compelling performance comes from Watts as Valerie, a tightly controlled woman trained in a lifetime of secrecy and a faith in her resilience (“I don’t have a breaking point”) who, for the first time, has to cope with exposure and vulnerability. You feel for her helplessness, while Penn’s character appears to exult in articulating his outrage.
FAIR GAME
- Directed by Doug Liman
- Written by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth
- Starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn
- Classification: PG
